Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

He hinted at the Church committee of the early ’70s, that Senatorial committee which moved swiftly and decisively, when it got around to it, to chain our intelligence services to a tree. (His rhetoric was less direct.)

And unnamed deputy told the paper of McLaughlin: “He spent the last 32 years at the agency and has earned the right to have views of his own. Anyway, what are they going to do to him?”

They’re negativity toward the President is proving ineffective, so you can probably expect additional juvenile histrionics like we saw after the 9-11 Commission’s interim staff report was released and editorialized upon by news reporters from everywhere, some even that crawled out briefly from under rocks.

It does not document anything, so the “documentary” label should not apply.

What warps the minds of men like that?

This was made possible because we are winning the war on terror. The Liberation of Iraq, a component of that war, played a part in convincing Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qadhafi to give up his WMD, renounce terror, and join the civilized world. And fortunately for the world, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair possessed the diplomatic acumen to make it happen.

A guest on the Fox News Channel Monday suggested that Iraq’s interim government is a sham - a proxy of the United States - and he also suggested that the date for transferring sovereignty to Iraq was moved up two days to draw the media’s attention away from a U.S. marine who has been threatened with beheading. The comment was made by Rick MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s Magazine.

The man sounds as if he has his head stuck up his Buzzflash.com, so to speak.

(Buzzflash.com is news from the juvenile, liberal perspective.)

I saw Juan Williams, a liberal, on FNC this morning, and he gave a genuine analysis.

It is not, in my estimation, unethical. CBS is making money from pumping Clinton and Clinton is making money from the CBS circus. It’s a nice deal for both sides, and the government ought to stay away from it.

The only Clinton I’ve caught over the past few weeks is the backwash and detritus of this campaign, so it can be nearly ignored.

I’m more concerned with the ads for Michael Moore’s new flick. The FEC ought to become involved in that, as long as we have a government regulating political advertising, because the ads are like anything from MoveOn.org and the ilk.

He runs a great projection, fascinating. Check it out.

They’re leading the Mets, 7-5, in this evening’s game.

“Ralph Nader has had more influence on my life than any human being who is not related to me,” said an ebullient Mr. Cobb, flashing the peace sign to cheering supporters in the grand ballroom of the Midwest Airlines Center here. “Ralph, if you are watching, thank you for what you have done, and thank you for what you will continue to do.”

Aren’t they a fun bunch?

WILL KERRY CROSS PICKET LINE???: Despite having publicly announced that Sen. Kerry would be forgoing his appearance at the US Conference of Mayors gathering in Boston, Kerry campaign sources now tell ABC News’ Ed O’Keefe that no decision has been made regarding Kerry’s appearance. A (final) decision is likely forthcoming within the next day.

KERRY SPOKESMAN: “He never crosses a picket line.”

Perhaps the staff will very publicly announce that JF Kerry will cross the line and attend, then Kerry will even more publicly “overrule” his staff. Kerry will be the principled union guy.

It ain’t over ’til Yogi Berra sings.

We try for one episode a night…

Oh, there’ll be more on that.

He might have been thinking about the over told story of Presidnet Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neil. They would do battle on policy all day and share a drink at night, is how that one goes.

It’s a different game with Leahy. Neither Reagan nor O’Neil were as personally savage as are Leahy and his colleagues. There is a limit, Leahy (et al.) have crossed it, and Cheney spoke for many of us. (But, as the Veep told Neil Cavuto on FNC this afternoon, “that’s not the kind of language I usually use.”)

Note, though, that challengers have rarely selected the expected person as veep.

And I’m listening to Telemann. I think he is, behind J.S. Bach, the most interesting baroque composer. You can argue Vivaldi or Handel, and that’s fine, but I also like that Telemann could compose at the drop of a hat. Kewl.

Voting no were Byrd of West Virginia, Jeffords of Vermont, and Sununu of New Hampshire. JF Kerry wasn’t there to vote, and we’ll have to see if he throws a fit tomorrow.

Actually, it is owned by someone named Saud Alani of something called Alani Corp in Richardson, Texas, and it was registered on October 13, 2002.

I’ve heard of selling domain names, but this is the first I’ve seen of an opportunity to sell a domain extension/country code.

The deal is, if they turn themselves in within 30 days, they will be tried and punished under Islamic law. If they refuse and are subsequently captured, they will be beheaded.

You know, if there were ever a case of a government making its own bed and being forced to lie in it, this is it.

“Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed, there are many rewards; if you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book.” - Ronald Reagan, referring to Ulysses S. Grant, but nonetheless doubly applicable today.

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It was quite a mistake, but I hope we don’t have to sit through Congressional Hearings on the matter.… (We won’t.)

We need the AP on this one: Was Saddam’s torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions authorized at the highest levels of our government? Oh, gee.

I’ve not read the case, but it seems the question was whether or not one has a right to keep his name private in any circumstances. Weight that against the compelling state interest to know the name in furtherance of their duty to protect society.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority that “answering a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant in the scheme of things as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances.” So he is trivializing the telling of a name.

It seems to me that such privacy must be an all-or-nothing prospect. But that’s philosophically. I cannot construe the Constitution as to protect a “right” not to state one’s label.

I posted on this earlier in response to a Bill Safire column blaming the committee staff for the press’s lack of comprehension and critical thought. And I tried to offer a solution to what I see as a very real and serious problem.

“When the Berlin Wall fell, the perpetual right in America didn’t have an enemy any more, so I had to serve as the next best thing,” Clinton said.

That’s not from his book, evidently, but it is an example of a really bad attempt to psychoanalyze his way from blame.

Clinton as a substitute for the Soviets? Hardly.

Also, this means that if he thinks his opponents were motivated by pettiness in criticizing him, he feels that they were also unjustified in attacking the Soviet Union.

He’s a shame.

“He didn’t ask my permission,” Bradbury, 83, told The Associated Press on Friday. “That’s not his novel, that’s not his title, so he shouldn’t have done it.”

Bradbury is a registered Indie and says he will be satisfied if Moore will “shake hands with me and give me back my book and title.”

Juan Williams discounted Joe Biden’s chances, calling him a “darkhorse.”

There was dancing during the convention. Traditional African drummers signaled the start of the agenda voting and several women were inspired to dance in the aisles, including artist and activist Amina Baraka.

The vote drew Baraka’s husband Amiri, along with pioneering rap artist Chuck D. of the group Public Enemy, often credited with reviving conscious rap. A performance from revolutionary rap group Dead Prez made the delegates rush the stage.

How are the R’s and D’s going to top that?

From THE BUZZ on the Kansas City Star’s web site, we have the follow explanation from a Kennedy aide: “In no way should the remark be construed as derogatory of the Pope.” Don’t worry, Ted, it wasn’t.

Ted did not fault the Pope for giving communion to Augusto Pinochet; rather, he said that if it was okay for the Pope to give communion to a nasty like the general, surely he can give it to a nasty like JF Kerry.

It might no be what he meant, but it is what his statement meant.

He goes on to speculate that this decision is leading us towards Congress setting the standards for the Holy Communion, and it not being “the Body of Christ but some strange permutation of ‘celebration’ deemed acceptable by the Senate. Very, very, very illicit, very evil.”

I have had similar thoughts regarding the ordination of homosexuals.

If we take this to its logical conclusion, we’ll all one day have to worship the same genderless entity in the same manner.

I wish the Catholic Church would enforce its own doctrine.

He’s a lefthander and throws an 89 MPH fastball. Don’t worry, he’s got good stuff — at least as far as I could tell over the radio for the six innings he pitched. Which isn’t very far, but John and Charlie liked his pitching.

They’ll do a pregame at 6:30p, cut to 60 Minutes for an hour for Clinton, then begin the game at 8 on WCBS. For the Yankees radio network affiliates, they’ll do the normal pregame at 7:30 and begin the game at 8.

I’ll listen to both pregames over the ‘net. Clinton’s Clinton, and he can do his thaang without me.

From Nancy Pelosi’s statement:

For nearly three years, the Bush Administration has misrepresented the depth of the relationship between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda. They continue to do so, even after the 9/11 Commission concluded this week that there is no evidence of a working association between Iraq and al Qaeda, despite evidence of some contacts over a 10-year period.

It’s always something.

It’s a thought….

‘’As you know, we have ongoing cooperation with the Russian government, including in matters of intelligence. And we don’t discuss specific intelligence matters,'’ spokeswoman Claire Buchan told reporters.

‘’We’ve declassified as much information as we can to talk about the threat that Saddam Hussein posed. And clearly, he was a threat to America, to the world,'’ she said as Bush travelled here for a campaign stop.

They are leaving the impression that there might be more intelligence impuging Saddam, and there probably is. There must also be evidence the 9-11 Commission hasn’t seen.

Editorial opinions are editorials opinions. What bothers me is the actual reporting, purporting to be hard news. I’ve covered this.

President Bush was said to have had a “good week” in the press last week, and it seems the media is attempting to concoct its own perverse brand of “fair and balanced.” They’ll report fairly on the President one week and balance it with screeches and whines the next.

This is not their finest hour.

Wow. I am so speechless as to be devoid of speech.

I wonder how long until the mainstream picks up on this story.

A White House official said Cheney’s assertion, which he repeated this week, that the ousted Iraqi leader had long-established ties to al Qaeda, were based on “facts.'’

“Hell no!'’ another administration official said when asked if Cheney would retract his statements after the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks found no evidence that Iraq aided al Qaeda attempts to strike the United States.

The nodus here seems to be that the press believes that if Saddam and al Qaeda cooperated on anything, the must have cooperated on everything, including the September 11 plan. This is a logical fallacy.

Clinton said his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea, were able to overcome the effect of the revelation of the affair through counseling.

His interview will be on the 60 Minutes infotainment show Sunday.

I’ve also found an interesting Real Audio station, ZDK FM 97.1, from Antigua. It’s interesting to hear the political tone of the lyrics of many of their pop songs. It is island music, and it’s refreshing to know that they are a politically aware culture. At least to that extent.

“It’s not fair, it’s not right and the public is not being well-served,” said Healey, who said she was speaking on behalf of Republican Gov. Mitt Romney. “I’m calling on John Kerry to resign so that we can fill that office with someone who is 100 percent devoted to the job of representing the people of Massachusetts.”

In 1996, Bob Dole left the Senate to chase Clinton.

The date on the receipt is the 7th.

Not that it’s germane to this blog.

Perhaps he’s given up trying to define himself.

It might work to an extent, in that the segment of the public which gets their news from the headlines believes these things. And compared to economic life within the Clinton bubble, it’s difficult for a sound economy to match.

One of the reasons for Kerry to think Vilsack, the paper hints, is that he “managed to transcend physical abuse by his alcoholic mother.” Admirable, my heart goes out — but we’re talking one-heartbeat-away.

“Ever since Franklin Roosevelt the US has built up alliances in order to amplify its own power,” one signatory, John Matlock, the ambassador to the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, told the Los Angeles Times.

“But now we have alienated many of our closest allies, we have alienated their populations,” he said. “We’ve all been increasingly appalled at how the relationships that we worked so hard to build up have simply been shattered by the current administration in the method it has gone about things.”

For Germany and France? France opposes the United States as a matter of course, and Germany opposed us recently because Schroeder had an election to win.

This President is the first one to reach out to Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the other Warsaw Pact country, bringing them onboard.

They’ll hold a press conference with the cameras rolling.

Let the Bush/Cheney counter this nonsense with 100-fold in support of his policies. Which brings up the old saw about the tree falling in the forest.

Perhaps he’ll claim Kerry helped him to end the cold war (see a few posts below).

Goodbye, Mr. President.

It is a mess,” he told ABC News. “Bush is leading independents by three, ahead among Republicans by a larger margin than Kerry is ahead among Dems, and we are down by seven? Outrageous.”

On FOX News Channel’s Special Report, Brit Hume included in his nightly Political Grapevine that this poll included 13-percent more Democrats than Republicans. This is not only unscientific, it is biased.

If the country were evenly divided, should Kerry not have been leading by 13 points?

This is indeed a mess.

More tomorrow.

Ronald Reagan’s presidency collapsed at the precise moment on November 25 1986 when he appeared without notice in the White House briefing room, introduced his attorney general, Edwin Meese, and instantly departed from the stage. Meese announced that funds raised by members of the national security council and others by selling arms to Iran had been used to aid the Nicaraguan contras.

He remarks that funding the Contras violated “anti-terrorism laws and Congressional resolutions.” WRONG. It violated the Boland Amendment, Sid. It had nothing to do with terrorism.

Anyway, he thesis is that the great embarrassing violation that was Iran-Contra, the one that was becoming a footnote until Marine Lt. Colonel Oliver North turned it back at the Administration’s antagonists, forced the President to ditch the conservatives and embrace Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

The column is littered with fabrications and careless hypotheses. Just Sid being Sid.

“If you take the case of Iran, its nuclear program is far more advanced than Iraq’s was,'’ Clarke told the Austrian daily Der Standard in an interview translated into German. “There would have been far more grounds to invade there (Iran).'’

Of course, Iran is not run by a sadistic, megalomaniacal despot eager to develop the weaponry to enact both his will and his vengeance on all and sundry.

Clark also ignores that WMD were only one of the reasons the Administration gave to invade Iraq. As Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair magazine in May of 2003 [LINK]:

there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there’s a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two.”

They emphasized the WMD because it was the easiest to sell. (The third reason, Wolfowitz asserts, is not enough reason to send America’s kids to war on the scale we did.)

This evening, I happened upon a wonderful FLASH tribute to President Reagan, accompanied by the Eric Clapton song, Tears in Heaven.

Get a kleenex, turn up your speakers, and visit what “Daniel” calls: My Tribute to the Late Ronald Reagan. It’s simple and poignant.

It’s as simple as that. President Reagan’s life was lived as it was. His Presidency was what it was. The effects of his Presidency, felt today and probably throughout the remaining history fo this Republic, are what they are. No matter what is said, A is A.

The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of Democratic Party leadership–in the White House and in Congress–for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us. They tell us they have done the most that humanly could be done. They say that the United States has had its day in the sun; that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems; that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities.

My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view. The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves. Those who believe we can have no business leading the nation.

I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose. We have come together here because the American people deserve better from those to whom they entrust our nation’s highest offices, and we stand united in our resolve to do something about it.

If people want to believe the little stories the left invents concerning the 1980s, it’s their right to live in ignorance. I’m more than happy to celebrate the truth.

Certainly, he has not been with us cognitively for almost a decade; when I would write of the “living Presidents” as a group doing something present and active, need deemed I meant Ford, Carter, Bush the elder, Clinton, and President Bush. President Reagan was not a part of this.

Still, though, knowing that he was alive, on the face of the Earth, was reassuring. He was a point around which to focus, and there is no conservative alive today who can wear that outfit.

Like I wrote Saturday evening, we’ve got to push on through.

I do know that I am being at least ruminative as I type, so here goes.

I had just opened my eBible to the Book of Job, as that is what my assignment was. Before I started, my wife called up on the intercom: “You better turn on the TV.” I heard the news from FOX, though I had expected it all day.

I put on a CD of Leopold Hoffman’s tunes (baroque composer) and read from the Book of Job, which turns out, contrary to Howard Dean’s earlier assertion, not to be a part of the New Testament.

(I am not factoring in JF Kerry as the Dem nominee. As I’ve said since long before he had the requisite delegates ready to vote for his candidacy, the man is a nothing candidate, generating no enthusiasm. The Ultimate Null is how I later referred to the candidate and the phenomenon.)

If the issue is the economy, it will work in the President’s favor. Pretty soon, it is going to sink in that things are going very well. The rhetoric coming from the opposition i